Words Which Have Seen Better Days, Part II.
by G. L Apperson.
Volume 12, 1901, pgs. 264-271
Word-history, like other kids of history, repeats itself. Very interesting are those words and phrases which have seen better days in a different sense to the misuses I have been mentioning. Such terms may be classed--firstly, as those which, though still literary, recognised words, are now used in a lower, more unpleasant, or more restricted sense than formerly; and secondly, as those which, once used in literary English, have now fallen from their former high estate, and, while no longer seen in serious writing of often heard from mouths polite, yet enjoy a vigorous existence either in dialect or among the humbler ranks of society. A good example of the former class is "knave." "Knave," nowadays, is not descriptive of the kind of person with whom one wishes to have any very intimate relations. Knave and rascal are synonymous terms. But it was by no means always so. Centuries ago "knave" was an equivalent for "boy"; and originally it meant servant. Old translations of the Bible have "Paul, the knave of Christ," where we now say "the servant of Christ." Wiclif's version has "knave child" for our "boy child." Again, when people use "platform" as a name for the programme or statement of opinions of a political party or candidate, they feel that they are using a colloquialism--one which is usually said to be of American invention. But, like not a few other so-called Americanisms, "platform" in this sense is of highly respectable English origin. As a verb, it was often used by the writers of two or three centuries ago in the sense of to lay down principles. Milton, in one of his controversial prose works, talks about church discipline being "platformed in the Bible."
"Respectable," although still itself a perfectly respectable word, has yet seen better days. Little more than a century ago it was a term of high praise. Johnson defines it as "venerable, meriting respect," though curiously enough the word is not in the earlier editions of his "Dictionary." Boswell writes of "the respectable notion which should ever be entertained of my illustrious friend," and calls Johnson the Duke of Argyll's "respectable guest." The Gentleman's Magazine wrote of the stone that covered the grave which held Mr. Johnson's "respectable remains"; while Lord Chesterfield spoke of the hour of death as a "very respectable one, let people who boast of not fearing it say what they please." It is a considerable descent from this view of "respectable" to the definition--so mercilessly satirized by Carlyle in his reiterated talk about "gigmanity"--the definition of a respectable man as one who kept a gig, or, to the present-day use of the word, as a term of very faint praise, as when we speak of so-and-so as a respectable musician, or writer, or what not.
One more example of this class may suffice. A word which might have served a very useful purpose in our language is "proser." We have no satisfactory equivalent in English for the French prosateur [prose writer]. "Proser" was coined to meet the want, and is to be found in this sense in Drayton. But the word has degenerated, and is now so universally used and accepted as a mere synonym for a bore, or a dull talker or writer, that it would be a hopeless task to try to employ it in any higher or broader sense, and, for the present at least, we must be content with the rather ugly compound "prose-writer."
I turn to the second class of words and phrases which have seen better days. Examples abound. The young lady in Dickens who "couldn't abear the men, they were such deceivers," Tennyson's Northern Farmer who "couldn't abear to see it," and the old lady who "can't abide these new-fangled ways," might all be said to speak vulgarly as fashion of speech now goes. But "abear" and "abide," although not now generally used by educated people, are words which have seen better days. It is only in comparatively recent years that they have been condemned as vulgar. "Abear," in the sense of to endure or to suffer, was good English in the days of King Alfred, and for centuries after. Like many other good old English words, exiled by culture from London, it has found a home in the dialects; and there are few provincial forms of English speech in which "abear" is not a familiar element. To "abide" in its now vulgar sense, is not quite so old as "abear," but is still of respectable antiquity. A character in Faire Em, one of the plays of doubtful authorship sometimes attributed to Shakespeare, says, "I cannot abide physic." Drayton makes a curious past tense of it--"He would not have aboad it." The word is still occasionally seen in good writing; but its literary use is dying out.
To "ax," for ask, is undoubtedly nowadays degraded to the rank of a vulgarism, but it really represents the earliest form of the word, and was in regular literary use for centuries, until it was supplanted by "ask," which had formerly been simply a current form in the northern dialect. To "ax" still survives in the dialects of midland and southern England. So, when a lady of the Sairey Gamp school "axes yer pardon for makin' so bold," she is using a verb which was literary English from the days of Chaucer and earlier to nearly the end of the 16th century. Coverdale's translation of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, published in 1535, has "Axe and it shal be given to you." Wiclif's version, earlier, has the same spelling. By Shakespeare's time, "ask" had become the recognised form, and "axe" does not appear in any of the earlier editions of his plays. The study of language presents innumerable problems, and one of the most difficult is to account for the history of such a word as "ask." How was the northern form able to oust the more general "ax" from current use, and in course of time to stamp it as vulgar? It is a problem hard of solution.
Another example of the survival in dialect of a word or phrase once in literary use is to be found in the expression to be "shut of," meaning to be rid of. This is still very commonly heard in the northern parts of England as well as among the lower order of Londoners, but could hardly now be used in either prose or verse having any pretension to literary form. It is to be found in a variety of our older writers; in the pamphlets of the Elizabethan Nashe and in the Holy War of Bunyan. An example may be given from Massinger's play, the Unnatural Combat:--
We are shut of him,
He will be seen no more here.
Some words now very vulgar have seen much better days. A good example is the word "gob." As a noun, this is now vulgarly applied to the mouth, and as a verb it means to swallow. "Shut your gob" is a polite invitation to silence among certain classes of society. Says Tom Cringle in the first chapter of Michael Scott's famous sea-story--"I thrust half a doubled-up muffin into my gob." Yet the word itself is a very ancient and respectable one. "Gob" formerly meant, in a general sense, a small portion, mass, or collection of anything. In its longer form of "gobbet" it is found not infrequently in Piers Plowman, Chaucer, and Wiclif. One MS. of Wiclif's Bible has in the 40th chapter of Isaiah, verse 12, "Who heeng up with three fingris the heuynesse of the erthe;" but another MS. has "gob" instead of "heuynesse." It was often used literally or metaphorically to describe a mouthful or a piece of anything just large enough or fit to be put into the mouth at once. In Ludowick Barry's comedy of Ram-Alley, published in 1611, one of the characters says that "Throate the lawyer swallowed at one gob" certain land "for less than half the worth." The transition from mouthful to mouth was easy. The old general meaning seems to have survived in America. In Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, Gibraltar is described as "pushed out into the sea on the end of a flat, narrow strip of land, and is suggestive of a 'gob' of mud on the end of a shingle."
Another degenerate word is "clean," in the sense of "entirely" or "altogether"--"clean gone" and so forth. The word with this meaning was constantly employed by the best writers until a very recent date, but its use now in serious writing would be considered colloquial, if not vulgar. A frequently heard vulgarism is "along of," in the sense of "on account of." But, vulgar as its use is now considered to be, it is a genuine, good old English phrase, which was in frequent literary use for centuries before it fell into the vocabulary of the street. It is found so far back as the ninth century in King Alfred's translation of Orosius's History, and is, in fact, common in most of the early writers. It occurs in Chaucer and in Caxton [King Arthur]. In the first part of Shakespeare's Henry VI., Act iv., Sc. 3, the Duke of York exclaims:--
We mourn, France smiles; we lose, they daily get;
All 'long of this vile traitor Somerset.
Cymbeline, when telling his daughter Imogen of her mother's death, says:--
And long of her it was
That we meet here so strangely.
Another street word of respectable descent is "fadge," to suit, or fit. Its use is now pretty well confined to coster-mongers and similar street folk; but it is to be found in Shakespeare and in other Elizabethan and Jacobean writers. "How will this fadge?" asks Viola in Twelfth Night. "Clothes I must get; this fashion will not fadge with me," says a character in Beaumont and Fletcher's Wit without Money.
A notable instance of descent from literary to vulgar use is to be found in the history of one of the meanings of the verb to "cut." The phrases to "cut over" and to "cut away," are found in the writers of the latter part of the sixteenth century, bearing precisely the same meaning--to go, to move hastily--as attaches to the corresponding modern slang expression. The phrase to "knock off," meaning to desist from, to give up--men "knock off" work at such and such an hour--is a familiar colloquialism, with a peculiarly modern appearance; but, in reality, it can shew good authority for its existence in its use by one of the best and most vigorous of English prose writers. In the tenth chapter of the History of the Worthies of England, 1662, Thomas Fuller writes: "In noting of the nativities, I have wholly observed the instructions of Pitseus, where I knock off with his death, my light ending with his life on that subject." While quoting Fuller, I may note that he uses quite seriously the now very vulgar word for food--"prog." Various absurd derivations have been suggested for "prog," but perhaps the most ridiculous is that which makes it a pun upon the mythological Progne, a swallow. Dr. Johnson gives it a place in his Dictionary, but severely calls it a low word. Yet, a hundred years earlier, Fuller, in his Church History, published about 1660, remarks of certain monks that--"The abbot also every Saturday was to visit their beds [cells] to see if they had not shuffled in some softer matter or purloined some progge for themselves." The monks of old would appear to have had certain tastes in common with school-boys of the present day, including a love for clandestine and forbidden suppers.
Yet another word which has undergone depravation is to "square," in the sense of to quarrel. In the newspaper reports of police court cases one may read how some offender "squared up" at a companion or at the police, but the phrase is pretty certain to be marked off as slangy by the use of inverted commas. But to "square" in a quarrelsome sense is very old and respectable English. An excellent example of its literary use is to be found in the exquisite poetry of the Midsummer Night's Dream. In the second act of that delightful play, Puck, describing the quarrel between Oberon and Titania, says:--
And now they never meet in grove or green,
By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen,
But they do square, that all their elves for fear
Creep into acorn-cups and hide them there.
To "square" suggests "on the square," a phrase now seldom heard save amongst those who prey on society, who, in their own language, live or work "on the cross." They know and use the phrase; but take care not to put it into practice. A cheat likes to have the "square play" on the side of his pigeons, for the process of plucking is greatly facilitated by conduct like that of Ingoldsby's "Mark Mousquetaire," who--
When gambling his worst, always played on the square.
This modern limitation of the phrase is simply a degradation of an older and wider meaning which was long current in literature. Udall's sixteenth century translation of the Apopthegms of Erasmus, has "out of square." The sense of a certain passage, says the translator, will not be out of square if one particular signification of a Greek vocable be preferred to another. In Chapman's version of the Odyssey (1596) are the lines:--
I see, the gods to all men give not all
Manly addiction, wisedome; words that fall
(Like dice) upon the square still.
Here the words seem to have a slight flavour of the later restricted meaning. But the earlier and better signification is more plainly seen in Udall's use of the phrase. The reference was obviously to proportion, and a sense of what was fitting and appropriate, derived by analogy from the operations of a builder or designer.
In the course of its downhill career a word often undergoes some slight change of form as well as of meaning. Occasionally it casts a syllable. A curious instance of this is the word "peach," which, as you doubtless know, means to confess, to turn informer, to act as tell-tale. It is an aphetised form of the verb "appeach." The latter word was in use from the fifteenth till about the middle of the seventeenth century; and side by side with it there existed the now familiar form "peach." Both meant to accuse or charge:--
Now, by mine honour, by my life, by my troth,
I will appeach the villain,
cries York in the last act of Richard II. As "appeach" went out of use "peach" began its downward course. A curious example of the word in its transition state is to be found in Hudibras, a great repertory of seventeenth century vulgarisms. In the lines:--
Make Mercury confesse and peach
Those thieves which he himself did teach,
although its primary signification is evidently to accuse, yet the word seems to have a half reference to its modern colloquial sense. In another fifty years "peach" had almost descended to its present level, and was used much as it is to-day. Arbuthnot, in the appendix to his satire of John Bull, 1712, a work which contains a great many colloquialisms, says that a certain rascal with an unpronounceable name "came off, as rogues usually do upon such occasions, by peaching his partner; and being extremely forward to bring him to the gallows, Jack was accused as the contriver of all the roguery." Another remarkable feature in the history of this word is that with "appeach" and "peach," a third form was simultaneously in use. Caxton [translated Malory's King Arthur] in his translations, introduced the word empeche, a much better and closer representative than "appeach" of the old French original empechier. In the altered form of "impeach" the word is still retained in use. It is a case of the survival of the fittest. Of the three rival forms one ("appeach") died out altogether, another ("peach") degenerated and is now a familiar item in the slang of the criminal classes, while the third ("impeach") still flourishes and retains its original meaning.
Many other instances of the decline and fall of words and phrases might be given. To "punch" occurs in Spenser. To "swop," i.e., to exchange or barter, is now an undeniably vulgar word, but it appears in the classic pages of Addison's Spectator, and is also to be found much earlier in Robert Greene's voluminous writings. "Tall," in the American sense of vain or braggart--"tall talk" and so forth--is only a modification of the former generally accepted meaning of brave or bold. Dekker, in the first act of his play, The Shoemaker's Holiday, 1600, says: "Hee's a brother of our trade, a good workman, and a tall souldier." The Ingoldsby bard sings shamelessly--
It's amazing to think
How one cottons to drink!
But to "cotton," meaning "to take to," "to agree with," was used by serious writers as a word of acknowledged respectability centuries before Mr. Barham enhanced the gaiety of nations. The phrase to "make bones of," that is, "to find difficulty in anything," is now restricted to colloquial use; but it was formerly current literary coin, and is frequently to be met with in our older literature. Its earlier form, current nearly five hundred years ago, was "to find bones in," which clearly shews the phrase to have originated in a reference to bones in soup, or similar food, regarded as obstacles to swallowing.
But you must be tired of examples, and I will not further weary you by quoting more. The downward process is a natural one, and degradation in the meaning of words will always be going on. It is not possible to prevent it, but it is possible, unfortunately, to hasten it; and this is constantly being done by the slangy tone, the loose habit of colloquially twisting or misapplying words, which pervade so much of modern speech. It is a case of "giving a dog a bad name." If once a lower of slang meaning or application be tacked on to an innocent word, the tendency is for the looser, lower, less exact meaning to oust the original and correct signification from colloquial use, and ultimately out of both spoken and written language. It is, of course, possible to go too far in the opposite direction, and, by too great a conservatism, to impede the natural process of the language, to restrict its growth and stunt its development. This was the tendency during the greater part of the eighteenth century. But there is little fear nowadays, and indeed but little possibility, of thus hindering the free play of the language. The danger lies, as I have pointed out, in the opposite direction. As Englishmen and Englishwomen, we are justly proud of our noble literature--a literature second to none that the world has seen, and it is not unreasonable that we should protest against wonton and unnecessary depravation of the vehicle by which that literary heritage has been handed down to us, and through which many and glorious additions are being and will be made thereto, for the instruction and delight of future ages.
Proofread by LNL, May 2011